Just a couple more inconsequential things I forgot to include:
Tonight I watched the special Playboy Mansion episode of MTV Cribs. Great TV. Where else can you see a busty blonde woman carrying around a tiny monkey in a diaper? The monkey was wearing the diaper, I mean, not the woman. I think.
Also, I forgot to mention that a few weeks ago I made custom error pages for my site. Here’s a 404 error and a 403 error. Wasn’t that fun?
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I started playing Naughty Dog‘s Jak and Daxter yesterday, and I’ve become quite obsessed. I played so much tonight that my head hurts, my back aches, and my arms are tingling. What a great game. It can be frustrating when you have to try a certain task over and over again, but the fun factor usually overshadows any frustration. The graphics and animation are fantastic, and as Rahul pointed out, it’s really neat that all of the levels are connected in one seamless world. As a bonus, in the developer’s own words, the camera doesn’t make you sick! I highly recommend the game to all you PS2ers out there, especially since it’s a PS2 Greatest Hits title, so it’s only $20.
In other news, my EE282 midterm wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I don’t know my score yet, but I at least answered all of the questions, which is better than I’ve done on a lot of other tests. Partial credit is my friend.
Every Sunday, Mariel and I go to the Menlo Park Farmer’s Market where be buy, among other things, flowers. We bought some nice big Gerber Daisies last week, so I decided to try my hand at photographing one. I blurred out the background in Photoshop because I thought it was distracting to see the texture of the wall around the flower. I think it came out decently, but I’m beginning to feel like 2.1 Megapixels isn’t quite enough.
I wonder if kids will come Trick-or-Treating to Rains?
I should probably stop writing entries at 4:30 a.m. This one is even more imcomprehensible than my usual ones. Ah well, I chock it up to the numbness in my wrists.
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It’s true. And while I’d like to follow my first instinct and get mad, I think I’d prefer to just feel sorry for them, and let them wallow in their own stupidity. So, You, Stupid Ignorant Person: wallow! Wallow like you’ve never wallowed before!!!
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Over the summer I was interviewed by some woman at Information Week. I thought she was going to ask me about my internship at EA, but she ended up talking to me about communication, the job market, and what it’s like to be a woman in computer science. I’m only quoted a couple times (as Patricia, no less,) and they kind of make me sound anal and money-grubbing. Ah, the truth hurts, doesn’t it? In my defense, though, I don’t ever recall saying I wanted a MS because the pay is higher. Then again, I don’t really remember what I did this morning either, so anything is possible.
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Some music videos I know I don’t like. In fact, I may very well hate them. But, like car crashes, sometimes I just can’t look away. Case in point: I just watched Justin Timberlake’s Girlfriend back-to-back with Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty. The longest 8 minutes of my life. To clense myself, perhaps I’ll follow Steve-O from Jackass’ example and pour Tabasco sauce in my eyes.
The one bright moment in the Dirrty video was when I was sure I heard Christina say: “You can tell when the music starts to drop; that’s when we take it to the Pokemon” but it turns out she says “parking lot.”
I choose you Skanky Ho!
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Just spent a total of around 8 or 9 hours working on an EE282 problem set. It would be AWESOME if the TAs would at least proofread those garbled pieces of brain-suck before they ran off 150 copies.
In other news, I had lunch with the KOK team today since Adrian, mentor extraordinaire, is leaving EA to start his own game company. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep in touch with him since he was probably one of the best people I’ve ever worked with — brilliant but not condescending. In the CS department, you usually only get your choice of one. In a related thought, hearing a British person say “Naughty Dog” is a pleasure all should experience.
Today I broke the 1000-spam barrier! Woo and hoo. Some of my favorites, “B.r.i.t.n.e.y S.p.e.a.r N.a.k.e.d” (perhaps Britney Spears’ homely half-sister), and of course “New discovery ends spam the easy way!” Hopefully I’ll hit that 2000-spam mark in a few months. I can only hope.
As an addendum to one of my
Finally, I shall end with a quote from my favoritest red-haired Scottish singer, Shirley Manson. Here are her thoughts on Avril Lavigne:
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Last night while “working” on our 242 problem set, Brendan and I caught an episode of The Osbournes, which I had never seen until then. What a fantastically strange show. The episode dealt with Jack going off to some “hippie” camp retreat with his school, Ozzy going on some sort of promotional tour which involved signing women’s breasts and going on TRL (not at the same time,) and Kelly having her 17th birthday party, complete with contortionist. How come I didn’t get a contortionist at my birthday party? Anyway, one of my favorite parts was Sharon telling Kelly she was stupid for getting a tattoo, while Ozzy sat by with his arms covered in ink. He did give some good advice, though: “If you’re trying to be different, don’t get a tattoo; everyone f**king has tattoos!” The best part, though, was trying to figure out just what the heck Ozzy was saying. Most of the time it sounded like, “[bleep] [bleep] mmrrffubledriv…” and he would sort of just fade away. All in all, a half-hour well spent (much more so than the 242 problem set,) and it is sure to be part of my regular Sunday night viewing.
My dad visited me today since he’s in the area for a business trip. We had a nice lunch at Max’s, and he complimented me and Mariel on our most excellent apartment. Not in those words, but the sentiment was the same.
Now for some more New Mexico news. While we lie awake at night, worrying about just what is becoming of the world, we can feel safe knowing that the scientists at Los Alamos have figured out a new way to blow ourselves up without uranium or plutonium. Rock on New Mexico.
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Today is Moo’s 25th (!) birthday, so for all of you who know her, give her a ring and tell her how old she is. 
An interesting thing happened the other day. I was sitting in CS205 listening to Ron Fedkiw go on (and on) about something called the Singular Value Decomposition. I was taking notes brainlessly as I often do, when he finished writing on the fifth chalkboard and stopped. He turned to the class and said, “This is all of linear algebra right here.” As he paused for what I can only assume was dramatic effect, I thought to myself, “Hey, that’s pretty neat.” Neat… NEAT?? I think that the fact that all of linear algebra can be reduced to five chalkboards of illegible scrawl is neat. Could it be that I found this class interesting? Is this what they call intellectual excitement? Was I finally understanding what Fedkiw was trying to say, thus quelling my urge to jump up in the middle of class and yell, “WHAT’S THE POINT??”
…Probably not. But it was fun while it lasted.
In unrelated news, while most of the country worries about snipers, nuclear weapons, and war, the good folks down in New Mexico have much more serious matters to attend to: cattle rustlers. God Bless the USA.
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From her October 1st diary entry:
I want to be her when I grow up. But perhaps without the vampirically pale skin.
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I consider myself a pretty nice person. I try to be pleasant to most people, unless they’re rude to me first. So I’ve decided that I want to be a celebrity just so I can be nice to my fans when I meet them. Think about it — all a celebrity has to do is to be nice to her fans, and bam — instant immortality. Even better is that celebrity standards of “nice” are completely different than the standards that the rest of the world upholds. To be considered “nice” by the public is basically to just not be a complete ass to everyone. In otherwords, all I would have to do is extend basic human courtesy to my fans. People would write articles about me, dedicate websites to me, and tell everyone they know that when they met me, I was so nice to them, i.e. I didn’t kick them in the shins or swear too loudly in their face. One bad thing about my being a celebrity is that I’m afraid that when I went on late-night talk shows, I would be one of those people who doesn’t interview well, or I would be just plain boring.
In slightly related news, I thoroughly enjoyed this quote from Pink on her MTV diary: “If there’s a girl in front of you in line for the bathroom, don’t give her attitude; ask her if she needs help wiping.”
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